As China continues applying the pressure of becoming the number one FinTech country, ZhongAn, an online property and casualty insurance company has announced the creation of an incubator designed to focus on blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI), further boosting the country’s intentions of becoming number one.

Founded in 2013 by Ant Financial, which was one of the four Chinese companies that made it in the top five annual FinTech 100 report this year, the China-based online insurance company will explore the technology through its ‘ABCD’ plan, which will focus on four areas: AI, Blockchain, Cloud Computing, and Data Driven technology.

Xing Jiang, chief technology officer of ZhongAn and chairman of ZhongAn Technology, said that they are creating a new FinTech ecosystem by combining technological research with financial innovation.

He stated:

We aim to be an accelerator for both finance and healthcare sectors.

ZhongAn Technology is reported to have worked with more than 20 companies such as insurance, security, healthcare, banking, and consumer finance, which helped create the Shanghai Blockchain Enterprise Development Alliance.

Not only that, but many Chinese companies are also adopting the ethereum technology to create ethereum blockchain-based solutions.

China Leading the Way in FinTech

As China continues expanding into blockchain technology, China is demonstrating that it is a country that needs to be watched. This, even though, at the beginning of the year the governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) stated that the blockchains experimented with had, so far, required too many computation and storage resources.

Since then, though, expansion into blockchain technology has slowly taken shape.

Last month, Russia’s National Settlement Depository (NSD) and the China Securities Depository and Clearing Corporation Limited (CDSC) revealed that they had decided to partner up to develop blockchain applications in the post-trade space. It is hoped that the two organizations will exchange information and experience while collaborating with settlement operations and other areas of the post-trade industry.

As can be seen from the recent FinTech 100 report with four of China’s companies in the top five, the country is demonstrating that it certainly wants a slice of the blockchain technology pie. As 2016 comes to an end, 2017 is set to be an even better year for China as it continues expanding into the technology.